Transdermal

You’re replacing the bandage for the night, and she’s dragging a finger across her eye, pinching out a contact lens. You wince for her, and she reminds you how brave it was to get the tag.

“Think of what a pioneer you are, like Shackleton, like the Curies. Didn’t you want to be a pioneer?”

It’s true, you agree, you just didn’t have the grades.

“Forget about the grades. Those belong to the ugly past with the rest of this country. Ugly, ugly. Past, past. We’re in the future now.”

The future itches on warm days, though, and near power lines it buzzes in your arm.

“It’s adjusting,” she says, “you’ll adjust.”

In bed you try to think of anything but the stitches, and you remember when you first moved here. ‘Adjusting’ was what your folks called it when your stomach made knots that kept you home from school. You had your own word of course, convinced the kids who called you names were adulterating your lunches. You turn to tell her what an imagination you used to have, but she’s already asleep.

It’s easy to trust the judgment of someone like her, someone who just lies down and sleeps without thinking about stupid kids stuff, even if it gives you an itchy arm sometimes. That might sound wrong, but with the tag she’ll know what you meant. In the morning she can see all the Devotion Points the tag recorded, and won’t have to hear your clumsy words, which sound wrong mostly, you both admit. You guess that’s what it means to be in love, to lose yourself a little for someone else, so you can be better or at least closer to right, but the stitches still hurt and you want to tell someone, and you’re not sure how you’re going to sleep, or if you ever can.